PKM2009 — First International Workshop on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Traditionally, Knowledge Management (KM) deals with creating and exchanging knowledge within groups, especially within organisational contexts. The needs and potential of individuals are rarely the focus of KM, although nobody could deny that individual knowledge workers, as creators, locators, posessors and consumers of knowledge, are the most essential element in KM. In Personal Knowledge Manamgent (PKM) the focus of attention is on individual knowledge workers and the aim of the research in this area is to increase the productivity of these individuals and, as a by-product, increasing the productivity of groups and organisations. Switching the focus to individuals raises a number of challenges and opens knowledge management problem to other domains interested in similar, perhaps overlapping, problems.

The aim of the two day workshop was to explore the challenges and issues of PKM and move towards the creation of a research community interested in working in this area. Papers submitted to the workshop were reviewed by an international programme committee and 5 full papers and 3 short papers were accepted for the workshop proceedings. These papers reflected the diversity of interest and challenges in the field of PKM, describing research on interface technology, infrastructure and modelling, evaluation, mapping between different knowledge structures, as well as cognitive and neurobiological perspectives on the problem.

The workshop began with presentations of the accepted papers. The first session featured full papers and the second session featured short-papers.

In his talk, "Towards Ontology-based Information Extraction and Annotation of Paper Documents for Personalized Knowledge Acquisition", Benjamin Adrian showed a method for bridging the media gap between physical documents and digital desktops. Along a semi-automatic annotation process, each document is annotated with Concepts of the Personal Information Model Ontology and finally transformed into a Semantic Wiki Article. Benjamin showed a user interface that visualizes an interactive document image, where users may accept recommended annotations or create new annotations manually. As base technology, the whole approach mainly grounds on Open Source solution i.e. Gnowsis as Semantic Desktop, Ocropus as OCR Service, Kaukolu Wiki as Semantic Wiki, and finally a free but not open source Information Extraction Engine iDocument.

David Elsweiler raised the issue of evaluation for Personal Information and Knowledge Management. He argued that this has been a major hurdle in the Personal Information Management community where he has been active. He presented his project which aims at triangulating laboratory and naturalistic evaluations using mathematical modelling techniques.

Marcus Liwicki presented an extension of the Semantic Desktop with a novel input modality: handwriting on paper. This extension allows for annotating printed documents with handwritten notes, which are then recognized, interpreted and integrated into the personal knowledge space. Thus it supports personal knowledge work on paper. In particular, the user can mark any text segment and annotate it with his or her own comments. The semantic of these comments and marks are then interpreted and, finally, the result is included in the user’s Semantic Desktop. One may argue that the trend is going towards the paperless office. However, currently this is more a myth than reality. The presented system can be seen as a supporting tool for the intermediate step we are currently in. Furthermore, it has to be noted that the system also supports work on electronic paper-devices.

In his presentation, Max Völkel emphasised the need to examine the costs and benefits of taking notes for personal knowledge management. He introduced the concept of a knowledge cue - an object or piece of information that has the potential to remind an individual about a particular piece of knowledge, but does not necessarily have to contain knowledge itself. He further stressed the need to let the user decide on the degree of granularity, formality and structured-ness of knowledge cues within a personal knowledge model.
Matthias Hert addressed the benefits Semantic Web technologies can have in Personal Information and Knowledge Management to exchange and integrate data from various sources across application and system boundaries. He presented an approach to overcome the heterogeneity problems that arise through the existence of multiple vocabularies for the same application domain. He introduced a mapping language and a transformation solution to bridge between these different data representations.

Olaf Grebner presented an architecture framework for higher-level activity support using multiple functional workspaces on the desktop. The presented architecture framework tackles the problem that today’s desktop systems face the two major drawbacks in supporting the knowledge worker (KWer) of a) insufficient support for a KWer’s higher level activities and b) the scattering of a KWer’s personal information across the desktop and its applications. However, research hasn’t yet shown an integrated architecture for realizing multiple workspaces on such a common abstract information model. The presented architecture framework proposes to base these functional-oriented workspaces on a common personal information model which itself is maintained as service. By leveraging the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop as foundational system and example for an underlying service-oriented desktop architecture, the framework represents an evolutionary architecture in contrast to more radical, but not commercially implemented research approaches.

The final two papers brought two very different perspectives on PKM. For example, Richard Pircher, in his talk, broadened the perspective, viewing meta-cognition and self-reflexion as central to PKM. By meta-cognition he meant the rational thinking about thought processes and knowledge about one’s knowledge and he meant self-reflexion in the sense of the individual’s more global dealing with his own identity. He also referred to recent neuropsychological research showing that emotions are so tightly interwoven with other cognitive activities, that they must be regarded even when dealing with 'objective' fact knowledge.

Lars Ludwig introduced 3 basic forms of a person’s artificial memory. 'Reflective artificial memory' directly reflecting and thus supporting consciousness. 'Extending artificial memory' reflecting what was once thought or experienced and thus - in principal - could also be remembered from biological memory. And 'expanding artificial memory' comprising new information that has to be associated to reflective or extending artificial memory in a meaningful way. Artificial memory systems are to be used as personal proxies that help reflecting, remembering, and learning. Lars Ludwig showed that knowledge can stem both from biological memory and from perception (of artificial memory). Both ways of knowing (thinking and remembering versus perceiving and being reminded) are prone to a great number of disruptions preventing from knowing. In (personal) knowledge management, not enough attention is being paid to these disruptions.

These papers proved to be a fertile source of discussion for the remainder of the workshop.

As a means to generate further discussion points, participants in the workshop were encouraged to demo research prototypes that they were working on. These were the system demos given

The first session of the second day of the workshop included an invited talk by Carsten Waldeck from Liquiverse. Carsten introduced some of the novel information access interfaces his company has been designing and outlined how they may impact on personal knowledge management. The interfaces are based on the concept of liquid browsing, which aims at optimizing information gain per pixel. The user can easily browse data on a scatterplot and change the displayed dimensions - numeric and ordinal. Carsten believes that these kinds of interfaces will empower the user as they struggle with the task of managing their information and knowledge.

The last sessions of both days were dedicated to a group discussion of the issues raised within the workshop. A highly productive discussion ensued relating to a broad range of topics. However, there were four main threads to the discussion. We summarise these below:

Throughout the workshop the discussion demonstrated that Personal Knowledge Management is both a complex area and one that requires input from many sources. It was evident throughout that this is a multi-disciplinary field and that related research is being performed in a wide range of academic areas. However, it was also clear from the discussion that there is a group of people interested in forming a community to study this problem. We are, therefore, grateful for the input from our presenters, attendees, and contributors to the proceedings who gave us two lively days of discussion and provided insights from different academic perspectives.